Yule Heibel's Library tagged feminism →  View Popular, Search in Google

Brilliant "rant" (not really a rant, more like good old common sense)!
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I am over members of my community putting pre-pubescent girls in a hijab when they are not even old enough to understand or give consent to this. I am over the fact that so many parents don’t understand that they are sexually objectifying their own daughter since the intention of the hijab is predominantly to conceal the sexual attraction of women from men.
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the_opinionista fundamentalism islamism opinion feminism britain muslim

The paragraph below clips a more serious note, but read this article for its sardonic wit, too. It's one hell of a ride, totally recommended.
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One could further argue that all of these menopausal women, in fact, represent a major evolutionary shift. Owing to women’s greatly lengthened lifespan (from about 40 in 1900 to 80 in 2000 in the U.S.), even the notion of what a woman’s so-called normal state is can be questioned: Northrup notes that before this time in history, most women never reached menopause—they died before it could arrive. If, in an 80-year life span, a female is fertile for about 25 years (let’s call it ages 15 to 40), it is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal “disturbance” is actually fertility. Fertility is The Change. It is during fertility that a female loses herself, and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. And of course, simply chronologically speaking, over the whole span of her life, the self-abnegation that fertility induces is not the norm—the more standard state of selfishness is.

Which is to say, if it comes at the right time, menopause is wisdom.
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sandra_tsing_loh christiane_northrup menopause atlantic_monthly women feminism

The following observation (by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, director of the Gender and Policy program at Columbia) is, sadly, very very true. There is a male unwillingness to mentor and/or sponsor women. I only have to look at my own academic experience and my PhD advisor...
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“Sandberg, to her great credit, had Larry Summers. She has had sponsors in her life who were very powerful, who went to bat for her. That’s very rare for a woman.”
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Very well-done sophisticated images of women (models), but I'm not so sanguine as the photographer, regarding the meaning and message. I see good-looking women made to look perfect, and from that I see a narrative developing that tells all of us women that our natural state is never ever good enough. This isn't something that pleases me, irrespective of the visual pleasures these photographs may provide.

beauty fashion photography feminism women photoshop m_seth_jones

Male bias is alive and well, even in the NYT obituary...
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But as the gold standard of American journalism, it should fall to the NYT to aggressively find and chronicle the lives of women who deserve attention in the obituary column right now -- women whose rich lives and notable achievements warrant the honor of recognition when they die.
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nyt obituaries feminism sexism gender socialcritique NYTpicker

Article by Bruce Bawer, on why stalwarts of the Left in Europe, gays in particular, are abandoning social-democratic multicultural politics. ...But, while things may be all right in Denmark, there are other countries where the backlash is creepy:
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The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.
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bruce_bawer city_journal immigration multiculturalism islam feminism europe

Scroll down for the part I bookmarked this article for ("We Live in a Virtual World"). Amazing image comparison, great commentary by David Byrne. The Redbook cover (with its perfected, photoshopped woman), compared to the original photo of the "plainer" model is amazing because it shows how it's the accretion of *detail* that makes for the overall effect - which cuts both ways, insofar as it makes the model more "perfect" and beautiful, and insofar as it's more pernicious. There's no One Big Thing you can point to that's wrong with the "improved" version. It's in the aggregate, which takes on an insupportable weight.

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Michael Dudley, who only the other day came out with a brilliant analysis of The Dark Knight, now looks at Mama Mia! across a range of feminist texts as well as some urbanist readings. Fascinating stuff, a must-read...

michael_dudley city_states_blog movies popular_culture feminism mama_mia!